Product Description

One of today’s premier biographers has written a modern, comprehensive, indeed ultimate book on the epic life of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this superlative volume, Jean Edward Smith combines contemporary scholarship and a broad range of primary source material to provide an engrossing narrative of one of America’s greatest presidents.

This is a portrait painted in broad strokes and fine details. We see how Roosevelt’s restless energy, fierce intellect, personal magnetism, and ability to project effortless grace permitted him to master countless challenges throughout his life. Smith recounts FDR’s battles with polio and physical disability, and how these experiences helped forge the resolve that FDR used to surmount the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the wartime threat of totalitarianism. Here also is FDR’s private life depicted with unprecedented candor and nuance, with close attention paid to the four women who molded his personality and helped to inform his worldview: His mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, formidable yet ever supportive and tender; his wife, Eleanor, whose counsel and affection were instrumental to FDR’s public and individual achievements; Lucy Mercer, the great romantic love of FDR’s life; and Missy LeHand, FDR’s longtime secretary, companion, and confidante, whose adoration of her boss was practically limitless.

Smith also tackles head-on and in-depth the numerous failures and miscues of Roosevelt’s public career, including his disastrous attempt to reconstruct the Judiciary; the shameful internment of Japanese-Americans; and Roosevelt’s occasionally self-defeating Executive overreach. Additionally, Smith offers a sensitive and balanced assessment of Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, noting its breakthroughs and shortcomings.

Summing up Roosevelt’s legacy, Jean Smith declares that FDR, more than any other individual, changed the relationship between the American people and their government. It was Roosevelt who revolutionized the art of campaigning and used the burgeoning mass media to garner public support and allay fears. But more important, Smith gives us the clearest picture yet of how this quintessential Knickerbocker aristocrat, a man who never had to depend on a paycheck, became the common man’s president. The result is a powerful account that adds fresh perspectives and draws profound conclusions about a man whose story is widely known but far less well understood. Written for the general reader and scholars alike, FDR is a stunning biography in every way worthy of its subject.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17209 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-13
• Released on: 2008-05-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 880 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780812970494
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Independent biographer Smith (1996's John Marshall: Definer of a Nation and 2001's Grant) crafts a magisterial biography of our most important modern president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Scores of books have been written about Roosevelt, exploring every nook and cranny of his experience, so Smith breaks no "news" and offers no previously undisclosed revelations concerning the man from Hyde Park. But the author's eloquent synthesis of FDR's complex and compelling life is remarkably executed and a joy to read. Drawing on the papers of the Franklin Roosevelt Presidential Library as well as Columbia University's oral history collection and other repositories, Smith minutely explores the arc of FDR's intertwined political and private lives. With regard to the political, the biographer seamlessly traces Roosevelt's evolution from gawky, aristocratic, political newcomer nibbling at the edges of the rough-and-tumble Dutchess County, N.Y., Democratic machine to the consummate though physically crippled political insider—a man without pretensions who acquired and performed the jobs of New York governor and then United States president with shrewd, and always joyous, efficiency. As is appropriate, more than half of Smith's narrative deals with FDR as president: the four terms (from 1933 until his death in 1945) during which he waged war, in turn, on the Depression and the Axis powers. As for the private Roosevelt, Smith reveals him as a devoted son; an unhappy husband who eventually settled into an uneasy peace and working partnership with his wife and cousin Eleanor; an emotionally absent father; and a man who for years devotedly loved two women other than his wife—Lucy Mercer Rutherford and Missy LeHand, the latter his secretary. This erudite but graceful volume illuminates FDR's life for scholars, history buffs and casual readers alike. Photos not seen by PW. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
As Franklin Roosevelt approached the stage at the 1936 Democratic Convention, the steel braces on his useless legs and the support of his son’s arm allowing him, in great pain, to simulate walking, he was jostled, and he crashed to the ground, scattering the pages of his speech. "Clean me up," he said, "and keep your feet off those damned sheets." Minutes later, utterly poised, he told an audience and a nation ravaged by the Depression that they had "a rendezvous with destiny." Smith, in this remarkable, sympathetic biography, doesn’t flinch at Roosevelt’s mistakes; the sections on the court-packing scheme and the internment of Japanese-Americans are painful to read. Smith also does a fine job with a complex marriage, avoiding the F.D.R. biographer’s trap of being either annoyed or enraptured by Eleanor. The Roosevelt who emerges here—neither a stranger nor a painted icon—is flawed and magnificent.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In January 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met at Casablanca to discuss Allied strategy in the European theater. By then, as Jean Edward Smith writes, "Hitler's defeat in Africa was a matter of time" and the tide was turning against him in Europe, but a long, costly struggle lay ahead. Smith continues: "When the conference ended, Churchill went to the airport to see Roosevelt off. He helped the president onto the plane and returned to his limousine. 'Let's go,' he told an aide. 'I don't like to see them take off. It makes me far too nervous. If anything happened to that man, I couldn't stand it. He is the truest friend; he has the farthest vision; he is the greatest man I have ever known.' "

Hyperbole? Perhaps. There are many who will argue that the greatest man Churchill had ever known was Churchill himself. Yet of Roosevelt's greatness there can be no question. Twentieth-century America was blessed with greatness in many quarters, but none stood taller than Roosevelt, though of course for the last two decades of his life he could stand only with the aid of braces and crutches. He was a giant, immense in his flaws as well as his gifts, but a giant all the same. He led the nation out of the Depression that could well have destroyed it, and then he led it to total victory in the most terrible war the world has known. He gave hope to millions who had lost it, and he changed forever the relationship between the citizens of the United States and their government.

For a quarter-century or more, that new relationship has come under challenge, primarily because of the conservative revolution engendered by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and in the process Roosevelt has retreated somewhat into the shadows. Though the fruits of his legacy certainly warrant reconsideration, the relative neglect into which he has fallen is an injustice. So it is good indeed to have Smith's new biography of him. That he has managed to compress the whole sweep of Roosevelt's life into a bit more than 600 pages may seem in and of itself miraculous, but his achievement is far larger than that. His FDR is at once a careful, intelligent synopsis of the existing Roosevelt scholarship (the sheer bulk of which is huge) and a meticulous re-interpretation of the man and his record. Smith pays more attention to Roosevelt's personal life than have most previous biographers. He is openly sympathetic yet ready to criticize when that is warranted, and to do so in sharp terms; he conveys the full flavor and import of Roosevelt's career without ever bogging down in detail.

In sum, Smith's FDR is a model presidential biography. Roosevelt's previous biographers sometimes had a hard time of it. Two eminent historians, Frank Freidel and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., set out to write multivolume lives of Roosevelt, but neither project was completed. Freidel's four volumes get only to 1933 (he did eventually write a somewhat anticlimactic one-volume complete life), and Schlesinger's three volumes get only to 1936. Among the one-volume studies, three stand out: James McGregor Burns's Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (1956), Nathan Miller's FDR: An Intimate History (1983) and Ted Morgan's FDR: A Biography (1985). Each has its merits, but none matches the commanding authority of this one.

Smith, who is in his mid-70s, has had a distinguished career. A native of the District of Columbia, he served for three and a half decades as professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and is now at Marshall University. A veteran of several years of military service, he has written frequently about military matters. His best known books include biographies of Chief Justice John Marshall, Gen. Lucius Clay and Ulysses S. Grant. He is that rarest and most welcome of historians, one who addresses a serious popular readership without sacrificing high scholarly standards.

At the outset Smith establishes one of his central themes: "The riddle for a biographer is to explain how this Hudson River aristocrat, a son of privilege who never depended on a paycheck, became the champion of the common man. The answer most frequently suggested is that the misfortune of polio changed Roosevelt," but though this is "undoubtedly true," it "does not go far enough." Roosevelt was deeply touched by the poverty he saw in Georgia while treating his polio at Warm Springs, and some who knew him believed that his aborted love affair with Lucy Mercer had an "equally profound effect" by deepening his emotional response to other people. Smith believes, though, that Roosevelt simply "was too talented to be confined by the circumstances of his birth," and that he was probably the most preternaturally gifted politician the nation has ever known.

Not that he was an easy man to know. He was gregarious and "relished informality," yet possessed "an unspoken dignity, an impenetrable reserve that protected him against undue familiarity." He had "an incredible capacity for making people feel at ease and convincing them their work was important," but he kept his distance and others instinctively respected it. Through crises of every sort he remained "serene and confident, unruffled and unafraid," and if he felt any emotions he kept them to himself. He also "had a vindictive streak" and could be merciless to those who crossed him, especially in politics.

He seems to have loved no more than half-a-dozen people, and his wife was not one of them. Precisely why he and Eleanor Roosevelt married never has been clear; they were cousins, she from the Theodore Roosevelt side of the family, and there may have been something dynastic about the marriage. They seem to have enjoyed a measure of happiness and affection after their marriage in March 1905, and they did manage to produce six children, but Lucy Mercer came along a decade later; she and FDR had a "long, tender love affair [that] remained shrouded in secrecy until well after the president's death." Roosevelt chose to end the affair rather than his marriage, but he remained surreptitiously in touch with Lucy for the rest of his life (she was with him in Warm Springs on the day of his death), and he almost certainly was closer to her than to anyone else.

As to the marriage -- the most famous marriage of the 20th century -- Smith gets it exactly right when he says, "Eleanor and Franklin were strong-willed people who cared greatly for each other's happiness but realized their own inability to provide for it." In the White House "the Roosevelts lived entirely apart," seeing each other rarely except for rather formal encounters in which they discussed her interest "in racial matters and equal rights for women." Occasionally, FDR asked Eleanor to make political appearances, though he does not seem to have regarded her political instincts and abilities very highly. It was not until after his death in 1945 that she came fully into her own.

In any case, Roosevelt had the only political adviser he really needed: himself. He received invaluable assistance from many others, most notably Louis Howe, Harry Hopkins and James Farley, but he was the reigning master. His understanding of public opinion -- how to interpret it, how to shape it, how to lead it -- was unmatched, and it is telling that two of his most damaging mistakes came when he allowed it to be overcome by vindictiveness. The first and most famous occurred in 1937, when his anger over unfavorable Supreme Court decisions on New Deal programs led him to try to "pack" the court with additional judges who would be in his pocket; the defeat he suffered was humiliating, and he did not really recover from it until late in his second term. The other took place the following year, when he tried -- with a notable lack of success -- "to purge the Democratic party of dissident members of Congress."

There were other failures and disappointments, but mostly the record is astonishingly positive. Though his critics have generally contended that it was World War II, not the New Deal, that pulled the nation out of the Depression, the truth is that within six weeks of his taking office, "the banking crisis had been ameliorated, the government's budget pruned, and the heavy hand of mandatory temperance overturned." Subsequent programs -- Social Security, the Civil Works Administration, the Works Progress Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Authority -- were powerful and lasting forces for renewal and betterment.

Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative who believed that "modern society, acting through its government, owes the definite obligation to prevent the starvation or the dire want of any of its fellow men and women who try to maintain themselves but cannot," and who was willing to set aside (at least temporarily) his economic conservatism in order to serve this higher obligation. He established this as government policy and it has remained so ever since, at all levels of government; the conservative revolution of recent years has chipped a bit away from it, but not much, so deeply embedded has it become in Americans' sense of what they can expect from government.

As to Roosevelt's leadership before and during World War II, it matched and perhaps even exceeded Lincoln's during the Civil War. Roosevelt had far better taste in generals than Lincoln did -- he moved George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower way up in the ranks in order to put them in the positions in which they served so brilliantly -- and his understanding of public opinion never served him, or the country, better. Long before almost anyone else, he understood that this was a war in which the United States eventually would have to fight, but he also understood America's reluctance to enter another overseas conflict so soon after World War I. He was determined "not to get too far in front of public opinion," which sometimes angered his more hawkish friends, but "a more understanding assessment was offered by King George VI, who watched Roosevelt's helmsmanship with undisguised admiration. 'I have been so struck' he wrote the president, 'by the way you have led public opinion by allowing it to get ahead of you.' "

No, not for a moment does Smith believe the canard that FDR welcomed Pearl Harbor as a way to draw the country in to the war, but he understands that FDR maneuvered the country along the unmarked road to war with intelligence and respect for his fellow citizens. He presided over the war with incomparable subtlety and skill. Among other things, "FDR did not second-guess or micromanage the military. More than any president before or since, he was uniquely able to select outstanding military leaders and give them sufficient discretion to do their jobs." His sympathy for ordinary soldiers was bottomless; during one visit to a military hospital, he insisted on being wheeled into a ward for soldiers who had lost one or both legs, so they could see his own withered and useless limbs.

Whether Roosevelt should have run for a fourth term will be argued into eternity, but in doing so he did his nation one final service: He jettisoned the unreliable Henry Wallace as vice president and replaced him with the doughty Harry Truman. Given the desperate state of Roosevelt's health at the time, it is almost certain that he knew he was choosing the country's next president. Rising above himself yet one more time, he secured his high and unique place in American history by choosing the right man for the job. Now, at last, we have the biography that is right for the man.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

The definitive biography on Franklin Delano Roosevelt
FDR, by Jean Edward Smith, proves that no highly significant historical figure or event is beyond a great writer's ability to improve a particular body of literature. Indeed FDR is a towering work of both writing and scholarship. Smith again proves he is one of our foremost biographers and captures, in a very evenhanded way, the very essence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, this writing is up there with David Herbert Donald's Lincoln. Both took on truly larger than life topics and did so with energy and vigor.

The footnoting in FDR is highly extensive and the curious reader will look at many of them and make notes to read on additional topics as Smith piques the interest of any with any significant interest in Roosevelt. He, like Lincoln, was the President in a time where it is difficult to imagine, even for his critics, another person assuming the role. Smith explains and documents almost all of FDR's life and gives very plausible reasons for his rather radical views at the time, especially for one with his Hudson River pedigree. He tackles his many physical challenges, his relationship with his peripatetic wife Eleanor (see Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time) , his affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherford, his intimate relationship with Churchill (see Jon Meacham's Franklin and Winston) and his reliance on a cast of eclectic personal and political operatives over the years. All of his public years are well covered, perhaps even more so his early years in New York politics.

There is very little, if nothing to criticize about this book. One could make an argument that Smith tried too hard to keep it a readable 636 pages with and additional 221 pages of notes and an exhaustive bibliography. Maybe two volumes would have improved this work, but that is sheer conjecture. This book must be read by all with more than a passing interest in 20th Century American history. Simply sublime.

The most readable book on our greatest president.....
The debate will rage on forever - who is America's greatest president. One saved the union, the other saved it again, and also saved the world. This is the most readable, enjoyable and knowledgeable book on our thirty-second president. You will learn new things (not an easy thing to do in a FDR biography), come to know and appreciate the life and times of this great American and will not be able to put the book down. The book reads like no other biography - in some ways it feels like you are reading the mythical "great American novel". FDR was bigger than life and gave a better life to all Americans. Anyone who reads this book will come away with a better understanding of who he was and how he accomplished all that he did. My life is better for reading it,

Likely to be the standard reference on FDR for years to come
Jean Edward Smith's FDR will likely become the standard reference biography on the former president given the rare combination of easy accessibility and comprehensive research about one of the most complicated figures in American history. While the one volume format may limit the depth of some topics like Yalta, the overall effect is to create a rare hybrid: something that is both very readable and very deeply referenced. Five stars.

As Smith notes in the foreword, there is a ridiculous volume of literature on FDR, his policies, his lieutenants, and his wife. Smith's gift is that he absorbs the massive amount of scholarship, does an impressive amount of primary source research - some of which even after all the preceding authors is still quite original - and then unlike most academics translates it into concepts even neophytes can understand. While shelves are filled with volumes detailing programs of the New Deal, Smith both explains the programs thoroughly and then adds on all the behind the scenes deal-making and politics, yet does so in a masterly crafted 55 pages.

This isn't to say that Smith hasn't done his homework. In some places he adds significantly to the existing literature. For instance, Roosevelt's stint as Assistant Secretary of the Navy is probably better explored than any other of his biographers. The results are interesting: FDR's Navy Secretary boss, Josephus Daniels, was not the pushover that many historians argue, FDR contributed a surprising amount to the war effort (it was FDR, not Daniels, that championed the Naval Reserve), and Smith strongly supports an argument that his administrative experience was not just a political education in learning how to deal with Congress but also provided the background to succeed as commander-in-chief during World War II. Some of this is original research, other parts are synthesizing a bunch of underutilized biographies, but in total it works nicely.

Smith is an unabashed admirer of Roosevelt - his parents' farm was electrified by the rural projects - but objectively criticizes policy and people in a distinctly non-partisan manner. Woodrow Wilson is torn to shreds as a bungling holier-than-thou racist zealot, and when FDR makes similarly bad mistakes Smith calls him to task. Smith spends a good deal of time attacking FDR's hubris in packing the Supreme Court and attempting to purge the party of conservatives. Those have been covered before by others, but he successful argues there is no little irony how the former crippled his legislative agenda and the latter, if successful, would have lead to disastrous consequences on later foreign policy votes. Other errors like the Japanese detention order and screwing up postwar Europe by largely excluding the State department from policy decisions because of a spat between him and Cordell Hull provide balance. Conspiracy theorists aren't going to like how he tramples the Pearl Harbor myths - Dean Acheson's role in scuttling FDR's final attempt towards defusing things is noteworthy - but the scholarship is there in the footnotes for those who want to look it up.

This is a biography that will likely be used as the starting point for most research on the subject matter for years to come. Smith is to be commended for showing that not all scholarly biographies have to break the back of the reader. 5 stars.